What is the Outcome of SLOs?

By David Yancey, FA, AFT 6157 President

For many the idea of mandated Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) is a direct threat to the basic premise of academic freedom and choice. To others the use of SLOs seems a reasonable expectation and even a necessary ingredient of a successful classroom curriculum. But what is the truth? This is a question that is likely to become a much more debated topic in our community colleges than it was when SLOs first arrived on the scene as part of the accreditation standards first being suggested then ultimately required by the Accrediting Commission for the California Junior Colleges (ACCJC).

Whether or not the ACCJC can or will mandate these SLOs is not the point of this article. That question seems to have been answered by the recent re-authorization of the Higher Education Act [See Higher Education Act, S. 1642 (110th Congress, 1st Session, at p. 380)] that clearly exempts community colleges from any mandated use of SLOs in areas of faculty evaluation or academic freedom. The bigger and maybe the more important question for us and for our students is not whether we use SLOs or something like them but how we implement whatever we chose to use.

As many know the idea of SLOs found its way into education in the K-12 grades as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. It was aimed at imposing accountability on K-12 education and particularly on how to measure the performance of schools and then by extension teachers. It was a continuation of the conservative influence in our government to make our schools more like businesses that produce products by which we can then measure productivity according to some sort of standardized test.

The ACCJC took that mandate for K-12 and, without collaborative discussion or debate, decided it was also appropriate for the community colleges. Many in our profession have spoken out against this attempt and many have embraced the idea of mandatory standards. We are a divided community on this issue. I have colleagues that I respect and admire who accepted the mandate as an answer to the question of “what to do about poor instructors”. And taken to the extreme uses of SLOs I suppose that one possible affect will be to identify a poor instructor amongst us. But I doubt it.

I believe the way we identify poor teaching is through a responsible and professional approach to peer review. We all need to participate and support our fellow faculty. But we also need to be willing to speak up when we, as part of a peer or tenure review process, see what we believe is inadequate teaching. We have a good contract with good language about evaluation and peer review. It stresses the need for constructive criticism when we see it and improvement plans to allow our instructors to improve areas in which they are deemed in need of improvement. And lastly it requires us all to be willing to accept such constructive criticism and embrace it in the spirit in which it is offered. We are all imperfect beings and we can all improve ourselves in the classroom.

So as this debate begins and as the ideas of one side disagree with those of the other side let us remember that we can, in the words of our new president, disagree without being disagreeable.

Let the conversations begin.